The big data market is exploding. According to Markets and Markets, it will be worth $229 billion in the next five years. Despite the rapid evolution of big data, many small businesses are overlooking its benefits.
You should not make this mistake. You should consider the vast benefits of big data and invest in it accordingly.
Why Small Businesses Overlook Big Data (And Should Start Embracing it)
When business owners hear the words big data, they usually start to tune out because they think that it is meant only for major brands like Google and amazon. They think that is only feasible for multinational corporations that spare no expense in getting any kind of leading edge on the competition, for example.
The reality is that thanks to innovations made recently, Big Data and data management are cheaper than ever. Which makes anything on the Gartner MDM 2020 Magic Quadrant list available to even small businesses to help grow and streamline.
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It’s almost like a high tech Gold Rush to mine data and achieve impressive results that were not available before. In this article, I will go over several of the ways that your business, no matter how big or small, can benefit from using Big Data systems.
1 – Helps make better business decisions
What if there were a crystal ball that you could consult anytime you needed to make a decision that would affect the future of your business? It would be useful since you wouldn’t have to guess about important trends and insights. You wouldn’t have to worry that a bad decision could put the future of the company in peril.
Well, Big Data is the crystal ball that you are looking for. Though it can’t help make accurate predictions without additional context, it can give you the information you need to make a smart decision.
You can take a look at the data to see how the price of your products will change and how that has affected sales across the board. Big data can help predict fraud before it happens if you have a finance company. Joris Lochy points out that this is one of the most common reasons that financial companies are investing in big data.
The possibilities are endless. It can segment the data so a specific department can use only the relevant data to determine their best way forward without getting bogged down.
2 – Helps make your products better
Before Big Data, companies used to use focus groups to help them understand what people were looking for when purchasing a certain product or service. Then they would try to make their product better to help serve the customer needs. A long and inefficient process in other words.
Now, the data does the talking. A company can take a look at the spending habits of their customers to see what they are looking for in certain products. If you offer a service, you can tailor exactly what the service should include based on the habits of your customers.
3 – Streamlines your processes
An example of how your business can be streamlined by using automation is how inefficient older HR systems are. To onboard a new hire is a sort of Kafkaesque example of bureaucracy run amok.
Using Big Data can remove a lot of the repetitive behavior and automate much of it so your staff can work on other, more important things that require a human touch.
It can also help predict when staffing needs to be increased or decreased before a certain event. If data is showing a slowdown in the economy and predicts that there will be less spending in your field, then you can begin to scale down your staff ahead of the curve. And vice versa.
4- Become more responsive to competitor decisions
Competition has become more intensive in the age of big data. Companies need to be more responsive than ever if they hope to retain any semblance of a competitive edge.
Harvard Business Review author Thomas H. Davenport talked about the importance of analytics in modern business nearly 15 years ago. His words of wisdom ring even more true in 2020. You need to use big data to identify decisions your competitors are making and respond as quickly as possible.
5- Navigate Regulatory Challenges More Efficiently
Regulators are constantly imposing stricter standards on businesses in every industry. IBM Big Data Hub has talked extensively about the role that big data is playing with regulatory compliance in the 21st Century.
Your company should use big data to identify shortcoming in your compliance model. One example is with consumer privacy policies. You can use detailed analytics tools to identify weaknesses in your security protocols and take appropriate measures to safeguard them. You can also use big data to meet employee screening requirements by performing much more thorough background checks.
Big Data is Vital to Your Business in 2020
You can’t afford to be lax about your standards as a business owner. Big data will help you gain a huge edge over the competition. You should consider using it to the best of your advantage, because big data technology can make or break your business.